10/15/2026
🎉 September was Latine Heritage Month! 🎉
Today, we are celebrating mountaineers of the Latine diaspora. ⛰️🌏 The women listed in this post hail from all over Latin America, from island communities in the Caribbean to mountainous nations in South America. Latine women and q***r folks are at the forefront of mountaineering, not just in their home countries, but across the globe!
Brown Girls Climb chooses to use the term Latine and acknowledge this month as Latine Heritage Month.
The term Hispanic was adopted to identify folks of Spanish speaking origin. This term includes Spain but excludes non Spanish speaking countries in Latin America like Brazil. Latino/a, on the other hand, includes all folks of the Latin American diaspora, regardless of language spoken. Finally, terms like Latine and Latinx remove the gender binary from Latino/a.
1968 marked the first Hispanic Heritage Week, which later became Hispanic Heritage Month. In Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1968 Hispanic Heritage Week proclamation, he stated, “The people of Hispanic descent are the heirs of missionaries, captains, soldiers, and farmers who were motivated by a young spirit of adventure, and a desire to settle freely in a free land.”
This statement established the first Hispanic Heritage Week as a celebration of Spanish colonization, silencing Black and Indigenous voices within Latine communities, as these groups did not “settle freely,” and the land Johnson refers to was not free or uninhabited land.
This month, we choose to celebrate the resilience, diversity, and culture of the Latine community, with special emphasis on that of Black, Indigenous, and q***r folks within this community.
These posts are meant to start conversations about the representation of women and genderq***r folks of color in the mountaineering space. Do you know any other Latine women or trans folks breaking barriers in the mountains? Drop a comment below. 👇🏾💬
